Waterborn
Shared on Mon, 01/31/2011 - 10:50So Sunday's are my days to hang out with my girl and case the local antiques shops and flea markets for cool junk that we want to call our own. She is on the hunt for neat little nic-naks that we can use in our upcoming wedding and I always have my eyes peeled for video game related memorabilia and gear. We have several spots that we consider regular haunts. Due to the fact that we hit these places up almost weekly, we rarely find much there and can usually blaze through them pretty quickly. Well yesterday, as I was doing a "qucik scan" of one of these places, I found this.
For those of you who grew up in the 80's this Coleco Mini Table-top Arcade game should look familiar. These games represent one of the earliest attempts by video game companies to bring the arcade experience into the home. The graphics conist of simple VFD (Vacuum Flourescent Display) technology and there were orignally 5 games released in the series, including Frogger, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galxian. You can see a boxed version of the Pac-Man version over at Handheld Museum. There you can also see a few examples of how these games were incorporated into popular movies and TV shows at the time of their release. These games are typically difficult to find in the wild these days and usually fetch close to their original selling price of $60 on eBay. I have run across a few in the past, but they are usually in poor shape, with torn or missing stickers. The unit that I found yesterday was missing the battery cover (as you will see in my video below), but is otherwise in great shape. At $15, I could not pass it up. Check out the TV Commercial for this series of games & a videos of gameplay from my game and others thst I found on Youtube via the links below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv9ZNYOBZDw[/youtube]
Original TV Commerical
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK5jL97k4y8[/youtube]
My Video of Frogger Gameplay
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfG8I-qNo2U[/youtube]
Pac-Man Unit
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6wE05_gyZ4[/youtube]
Donkey Kong Unit
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Q4dirTXus[/youtube]
This video is pretty cool but make me cringe given the poor handling that these games are getting. (also, note that the Atari XL & 400 computers seen later in the video currently go for about $60 and DON NOT play 2600 carts - the games for these systems have a different form factor for their carts).
If you like heading out and finding video game gems like this at your local flea markets and antique shops, you should check out SoCal Mike's Big Game Hunter series on youtube. Mike is a member of the RetroGamingRoundup podcast crew and travels around Southern California looking for great deals. Being the in the birthplace of video games, he frequently finds items that I can only dream of. Check out episode one of BGH below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-Ag7EaF4M[/youtube]
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